EAT BETTER FOOD TRENDS

Holistic pioneers offer alternative ways to health
Trailblazing innovators tout dietary solutions to what ails us.
Lori Oliwenstein and Jay Dixit
Psychology Today

April 24, 2007

Americans consult alternative health practitioners some 600 million times a year -- more often than they visit family doctors. In that spirit, Psychology Today sought out these books by three natural health pioneers, holistic innovators who specialize in dietary solutions.

'Plan of the Caveman'

By Loren Cordain, Ph.D.

Home base: Fort Collins, Colo.

Claim: Eating as your ancestors did will keep you lean, healthy and young.

Claim to fame: Wrote The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (Wiley, 2002).

Argument: "We're Stone Agers living in the Space Age." Human nutritional needs are genetically determined, and our genes are shaped by natural selection. People gain weight from foods introduced since the agricultural revolution. The result is heart disease, diabetes and obesity in epidemic proportions. The solution is to return to the pre-agricultural diet of Paleolithic people.

His regimen: Like the South Beach Diet except with no grains, salt or sugar. Eats only fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, nuts and seafood. Does not eat any sugars, saturated or trans fats, salt, bread, legumes, potatoes, pasta, processed foods, dairy or grains. Even whole grains are disallowed.

Must-do recommendation: Eat only foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors could have eaten. Because the dominant food source for hunter-gatherers was animals, lean meats compose 55 percent to 65 percent of Cordain's ideal diet. He recommends exercising 90 minutes a day, seven days a week, noting that hunter-gatherers probably did three times that. Cordain concedes that nobody living in the modern age can follow every one of these proscriptions all the time. Most of the beneficial health effects of eating a modern-day Paleo diet can be achieved with about 85 percent or 90 percent compliance.

Research nuts and bolts: Using remains of Stone Age people from around the world, Cordain calculated the energy expenditures of our prehistoric ancestors. A thigh bone, for instance, can tell us roughly how tall and how heavy its owner was. Once he knew the weight, Cordain could calculate how much energy it took that person to move around -- the same way treadmills use your weight to figure the calories you burn during a workout.

By strapping GPS systems onto male Paraguayans while they're out foraging in the jungle, Cordain and his colleagues determined that cavemen probably ran 10 miles a day carrying 25 pounds. Cavewomen worked as hard, carrying children, setting up shelter, foraging for fruits and vegetables, and curing animal skins.

Critics point out that the lives of hunter-gatherers were nasty, brutish and short, with a life expectancy in the 20s. Why emulate that? Cordain's response is, sure, Stone Age people had it rough, but most died when they walked into tar pits, got clubbed in the head by enemy tribesmen, or were swallowed by saber-toothed tigers -- not from disease. Today's hunter-gatherers live well into their 60s, free of "diseases of civilization," such as obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Inspiration: When Cordain became a college athlete in the late 1960s, he sought food that would improve his athletic performance. The article that changed his life was "Paleolithic Nutrition," a now-famous paper published in 1985 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It made the case that human beings could be most healthy by emulating the diet and exercise patterns of the Stone Age. Cordain was sold. He speculated that modern health problems didn't start with packaged snack foods but with the advent of agriculture. People began eating more and more -- including more high-carbohydrate, fatty foods -- all the while stuck in the bodies of Stone Agers. So to maximize our health and fitness, Cordain concluded, we should emulate Paleolithic man.

'Raw Power'

By Natalia Rose

Home base: New York City

Claim to fame: Author of The Raw Food Detox Diet (Regan Books, 2005).

Claim: A careful transition to a diet high in raw foods will detoxify your body, increase your energy levels and help you lose weight.

Argument: Cooking food destroys many of the very vitamins and enzymes that we most need for optimal health and energy. Raw foods -- plant foods that have not been heated above 118 F -- have all the beneficial, health-promoting components intact, giving much-needed rest to the digestive system so the body can heal.

Her regimen: Starts each day with vegetable juice or fresh fruit. Lunch is at least half raw-vegetable-based. If she cheats and eats cooked food, she does so at dinner.

Must-do recommendation: Foods should go from light to heavy in the course of the day. "We don't want anything interrupting our energy flow," Rose explains. "And if your body is busy digesting food all day, that's where all the energy will go."

Research nuts and bolts: Rose doesn't conduct research but points to work by Francis Marion Pottenger Jr., who studied the effects of diet on cats in the 1930s. Some cats got cooked meat and others, raw. The raw-food cats were more fertile and freer of disease. Though no studies have been conducted to show similar benefits in humans, says Rose, "You don't need a study to know you're losing weight and feeling great."

Inspiration: When Rose was in her 20s, she was dissatisfied with her body. Studying nutrition at the Natural Healing Institute of Naturopathy in San Diego, she battled depression, anxiety, exhaustion, nagging physical ailments, a belief she was overweight and an ever-present discomfort in her own skin. She knew she needed help. Dieting made matters worse. Then she picked up a book about a raw-food regimen. "This wasn't just a diet, it was a lifestyle," she says. "My energy improved and any inclinations towards depression dissolved."

'Food As Medicine'

By Tieraona Low Dog, M.D.

Home base: Tucson, Ariz.

Claim: The use of plants and herbs as both food and medicine can enhance our health and well-being.

Claim to fame: Appointed to President Clinton's commission on alternative medicine; advises the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Argument: A diet based on plants and whole foods is in itself medicinal, as are dietary herbs and spices, which not only promote wellness but can cure disease. If you're healthy, such a diet will render supplements and extracts generally unnecessary.

Her regimen: "Predominantly plant-based," with meals made almost exclusively from scratch. Recipes take advantage of a wide variety of spices and herbs. In addition, she takes a multivitamin and omega-3 and exercises daily.

Must-do recommendation: Low Dog's regimen for the healthy is based on a simple but powerful lifestyle makeover. Not only should you eat a whole-food diet, says Low Dog, but "You should also sit down at a table at least once a day and eat with a fork." For people who are ill, there is an entirely different set of recommendations. Physical activity is also a must. "Thirty minutes every day, no exceptions," says Low Dog, a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do. "Think of it the way you think of washing your hair."

What she's most interested in now: Low Dog is exploring the roles patient beliefs and cultures play in the treatment of disease. "I'm looking at how to work within someone's beliefs," she says. "How do you talk to patients when their culture and beliefs directly collide with your own?"

Inspiration: In Low Dog's family, which is part American Indian, "folk remedies were definitely 'it,' " she says. "You had to have a hemorrhage or broken bones to go to the doctor." But as she points out, though her heritage inspired her interest in integrative medicine, she has gone far beyond the confines of any one culture. Her approach to healing draws not only on remedies from American Indian cultures, but also from the traditions of Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, Appalachian midwives, and Vietnamese and Korean healers, as well as mainstream medicine. Her herbal expertise predates her M.D. by several decades.

"I was an herbalist, a massage therapist, a martial-arts instructor and a midwife," she says. She even opened a shop, Tieraona's Herbals in Las Cruces, N.M. Ultimately, she decided she needed the training to diagnose disease and prescribe stronger medicines.

Blissed be, Annie
bodybybliss.com